Tuesday, 2 August 2011

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Marvellous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum

I've recently read, while travelling around Scotland (which, by the way, is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to), both The Wonderful Wizard and The Marvellous Land of Oz in e-book format on my Galaxy Tab. First of all I must say that reading in the tab was surprisingly good, I was expecting to miss the book experience much more than I actually did, but that being said, I still prefer real books. Then I'd like to talk about Project Gutenberg. It's a database of over 36 thousand free e-books in either ePub, Kindle, HTML or simple text format. Anyone who's interested in reading classics with expired copyrights go ahead and pay the site a visit, you surely won't regret it and if you want to you can even contribute to the adaptation process.

Now to talk about the books on the Land of Oz, I must start by saying that, of course, I had already seen the film, I knew most of the first story by heart and wasn't really expecting a lot of surprises. And I didn't get them. The author proposes to write a book "for the children of today", trying to keep the wonders and remove the nightmares and moralist elements from the stories, and he ends up managing that quite well, although he couldn't - or perhaps never really wanted to - avoid the transmission of morals as I show ahead. It's a fairly easy read, quick and seemingly uncomplicated with few hidden senses to it. It all starts with Dorothy being thrown into the Land of Oz by a cyclone and then travelling through the place to find some way to get back to her home and family. In her travels she gets to know many different places and people and brings with her the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Lion, who hope the Wizard can help them get brains, heart and courage respectively. There are two things that stand out as the main messages of these stories, introduced in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and further developed in The Marvellous Land of Oz. One is the idea of attribution of an ability or characteristic to something objective (beware: SPOILERS ahead) - the intelligence to the brain, the emotion to the heart - associated with the belief that such things cannot be developed or discovered in oneself and must be innate or given to you by an authority - the courage the wizard gave to the lion by having him "drink it". The other is the fallacy known as the appeal to (inappropriate) authority, seen here in the figure of the Wizard of Oz, who, for being the most powerful man in the land would surely know how to give brains, heart, courage and even how to send Dorothy back home. This absurd fact is further enhanced when, in the second book (again, careful with SPOILERS), the characters show that they still believe the Wizard of Oz was very powerful, apart from the fact that they themselves found out he was a fake wizard, because only one with such astonishing abilities could have given them the high quality brains and heart they now believe to be using. Two other noticeable things that contribute to the reader's perception of this are the lack of change to the Scarecrow's intelligence or the Tin Woodman's emotionality and also the lack of considerable difference between the Scarecrow and other characters in terms of said intelligence, even though they do ask him to use his brain to solve some problems, they also believing him to be the smartest of the group. These developments aside, the second book feels much more as a classical fantastic story, with a king overthrown, a rogue wicked witch, some magical feats and even a lost princess, though the author does start being bolder in terms of experimenting and introduces things such as a creature made by magic that wishes to be dead and even gender-changes. The relationship between Jack Pumpkinhead and Tip is also quite interesting and often comic.

These books weren't really exciting, not that they don't have good plots or that they don't bring any food for thought, but in the end I think what really didn't work out for me was the writing. They're books to be enjoyed by children and I believe I would have liked them a lot more years ago. I'm still glad I read them! Next on my list were Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and I am also slowly reading Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, but only when my mind feels rested and concentrated enough. Yesterday I started reading A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin which I am hoping to find amazing!

2 comments:

To be honest I've always found the Wizard of Oz (the movie) rather creepy - I wasn't so much frightened by the Wicked Witch as I was by the supposedly good witch. Even as a child her grin creeped me out and there were a lot of incongruences in the supposed "help" she gave to Dorothy. By your review it seems that the Wizard of Oz is little more than a conman and the other characters are willingly deceived by him into thinking they need external validation for their own courage or intelligence.

Actually, I think you should, as I said I'm glad I did in spite of the things I didn't like. It's a quick read and a classic children story. The fact that the Wizard seems little more than a conman and the reaction (or lack of) of the other characters is what makes it interesting and points out some of the big troubles of the human society even nowadays. The need for objectiveness in everything whatsoever, the search for reinforcement from any other person and the attribution of overall authority to people that are excellent in only one thing (or not even that much) are problems we as a species, as a society, as a culture need to address and solve, or risk being hindered by it, prejudiced and unfair to each other for years to come.But well, you already know all of that and there are so many good things to read that you have to choose not to read much more books that the ones you actually do read.